Enjoying the view from Limbo
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 22, 2021
Bill Kristol, who has chosen to express his disdain for the divisive and anger-infested rhetoric of the Trump cult that destroyed “his party” by throwing his support behind the Marxist front group that calls itself the Democratic Party today, has outdone himself, even by his own high standards of collegial, grinning, Harvard-man hypocrisy. Responding on Twitter — where the intellectuals gather — to...
Everyone is angry and outraged. Offended and shocked. An indignant crusader for justice. Above all, and most indicative of the mood of the age and the tenor of “public discourse,” everyone is absolutely, vehemently unwilling to brook disagreement. Today’s ideal teenager is a rabid-faced, frothing little girl overflowing with barely verbalized seething hatred toward all the grown-ups. Today’s ideal political representative is a...
I just read this headline from the Associated Press: “House moves toward OK of Dems’ sweeping social, climate bill.” So often these days, one reads of “sweeping bills,” “sweeping reforms,” “sweeping measures,” or “sweeping new mandates.” The metaphor is apt, if hackneyed, because it is very much of the essence of progressivism to view politics as a matter for brooms. In other words,...
Peng Shuai, a Chinese women’s tennis player, was foolish enough to write about an abusive relationship with a top-level member of the Chinese Communist Party on her Chinese social media page. She, along with her post, has since disappeared from the internet and apparently from any contact with the outside world. Now, a formal denial of her earlier accusations against Xi Jinping’s former...
My attitude toward the crowd is neither sympathy nor a craving to be understood, but rather retreat: to my privacy, to my separate space, to the few companions whom I can teach or from whom I can learn, to the rare authors (nearly all dead) who deepen my intellect, to my developmentally beneficial errors and failures, to my unanswered questions, and to the...
Let us cut through all the hocus pocus about the “One-China Policy” and how it should be interpreted, about “historical claims,” and about “avoiding instability in the region.” First, there can be no stability in a region in which the dominant player is an aggressive totalitarian slave state with the biggest military in the world. A house presided over by an oppressive and...
New polling shows the Republicans with a huge “lead” as America looks forward to the 2022 midterm elections. And so, exactly as I explained just a few days ago, the well-trained herd of “individualists” who call themselves “grassroots conservatives” or “constitutionalists” will be unable to resist running toward that football Lucy is holding for them yet again. The result will be the same...
You may appreciate a man’s talent for making money, but you must never admire him for it. For this would mean regarding wealth, or the getting of wealth, as the gifted wealth-getter himself does, namely as a mark of personal greatness. On the contrary, one could do worse than to adopt the following as a general rule: No extraordinarily rich man — especially...
It is November 11th. So many thousands of men died in conflict in the last century, primarily in two cataclysmic world wars, in the name of keeping the free world free. The enemies of freedom would be long dead now regardless of the outcome of those wars, as, presumably, would be their self-devouring political dreams. Meanwhile…
Yesterday, as occasionally happens, a good student who has maintained a regular correspondence with me even after graduation, and who is an avid reader of modern and classic literature, sent me this simple message regarding her future prospects: “I think I want to be a writer.” The following is my reply. What does that mean, “I want to be a writer”? A writer...
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